Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason - Hardcover

Shorto, Russell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 038551753X ISBN 13: 9780385517539

Publisher: Doubleday, 2008

Synopsis

On a brutal winter's day in 1650 in Stockholm, the Frenchman René Descartes, the most influential and controversial thinker of his time, was buried after a cold and lonely death far from home. Sixteen years later, the French Ambassador Hugues de Terlon secretly unearthed Descartes' bones and transported them to France.

Why would this devoutly Catholic official care so much about the remains of a philosopher who was hounded from country to country on charges of atheism? Why would Descartes' bones take such a strange, serpentine path over the next 350 years—a path intersecting some of the grandest events imaginable: the birth of science, the rise of democracy, the mind-body problem, the conflict between faith and reason? Their story involves people from all walks of life—Louis XIV, a Swedish casino operator, poets and playwrights, philosophers and physicists, as these people used the bones in scientific studies, stole them, sold them, revered them as relics, fought over them, passed them surreptitiously from hand to hand.

The answer lies in Descartes’ famous phrase: Cogito ergo sum—"I think, therefore I am." In his deceptively simple seventy-eight-page essay, Discourse on the Method, this small, vain, vindictive, peripatetic, ambitious Frenchman destroyed 2,000 years of received wisdom and laid the foundations of the modern world. At the root of Descartes’ “method” was skepticism: "What can I know for certain?" Like-minded thinkers around Europe passionately embraced the book--the method was applied to medicine, nature, politics, and society. The notion that one could find truth in facts that could be proved, and not in reliance on tradition and the Church's teachings, would become a turning point in human history.

In an age of faith, what Descartes was proposing seemed like heresy. Yet Descartes himself was a good Catholic, who was spurred to write his incendiary book for the most personal of reasons: He had devoted himself to medicine and the study of nature, but when his beloved daughter died at the age of five, he took his ideas deeper. To understand the natural world one needed to question everything. Thus the scientific method was created and religion overthrown. If the natural world could be understood, knowledge could be advanced, and others might not suffer as his child did.

The great controversy Descartes ignited continues to our era: where Islamic terrorists spurn the modern world and pine for a culture based on unquestioning faith; where scientists write bestsellers that passionately make the case for atheism; where others struggle to find a balance between faith and reason.
Descartes’ Bonesis a historical detective story about the creation of the modern mind, with twists and turns leading up to the present day—to the science museum in Paris where the philosopher’s skull now resides and to the church a few kilometers away where, not long ago, a philosopher-priest said a mass for his bones.

About this title

About the Author:

RUSSELL SHORTO is the bestselling author of The Island at the Center of the World and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Amsterdam.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

THE MAN WHO DIED
IN THE SOUTHERN EDGE OF STOCKHOLM'S OLD Town stands a four-story building that was constructed during the busy, fussy period called the Baroque. Its red-brick facade is ornamented with sandstone cherubs and crests. Two upright cannons flank the entry; bearded busts gaze down sternly on those who approach the door. If you could somehow ignore the designer handbag shop and the upscale "Glenfiddich Warehouse" restaurant/bar occupying the ground floor, and the streams of tourists moving past on a summer afternoon, the structure would probably seem very much of the year--1630--when a merchant named Erik von der Linde built it.

In the dead of night in the dead of winter in the year 1650, the most solemn rite of passage was playing out on an upper floor of this building. People hurried between rooms, past windows that looked out onto the dark, icy harbor below, exchanging information and worried looks. But if the occasion was grave, it wasn't quiet. For someone close to death, the man who lay in bed--not quite fifty-four years old, small-boned, ashen, the center of everyone's attention--was alarmingly active. It was fury that gave him these last bursts of adrenaline. His friend and protege Pierre Chanut, the French ambassador to Sweden, in whose house he lay dying, was at his side constantly, trying to manage the man's anger while feeling doubly guilty: it was he who had urged Rene Descartes to come to this frozen land and he who had first contracted a fever, through which Descartes had nursed him before catching it himself.

Chanut fervently believed that Descartes was in the process of transforming the world with his revolutionary thinking. In this he was essentially correct. A change took place in the middle of the 1600s. People began to employ a new, sweeping kind of doubt, to question some of their most basic beliefs. The change was in a way more profound than the American and French revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, or the information age, because it underlay all of them and affected the very structure of people's thought--the way they perceived the world, the universe, and themselves in it. And the person most closely identified with this transformation was the man who lay dying in the Swedish winter. Pierre Chanut couldn't have known the scope of the future, but he knew, as did many others, that something staggeringly significant was afoot and that Descartes was at its center. It had by now dawned on the diplomat that, in bringing the philosopher here, he had unwittingly engineered a catastrophe.

The fever had given way to pneumonia; the patient's breath was ragged, his eyes wandering. Chanut had wanted to call the court physician, but Descartes raged against that idea. Finally, from her fairy tale palace on the other side of the small island in the harbor that was the center of Stockholm, Christina, the twenty-three-year-old queen of Sweden, who would go down as one of the more remarkable personalities in European history (there is, for starters, the centuries-old line of serious speculation that she was in fact a king), sent her physician to attend him. It was Christina who, with Chanut, had coaxed the intellectual celebrity northward in the first place.

The doctor, a Dutchman named Wullens, approached the bed reluctantly. There was a sharp exchange in which the philosopher made it venomously clear he thought the physician an ass. The encounter climaxed when Wullens proposed bloodletting, whereupon the patient erupted with a theatrical cry--"Gentlemen, spare French blood!"--and ordered the man out. Wullens departed, washing his hands of the business, muttering as he went a rather fatuous piece of consolation from the Roman poet Horace: "He who saves someone against his will does the same as to kill him."
The rage had two components. First, the philosopher had known Wullens during his long years in the Dutch provinces. One of the early public airings of Descartes' philosophy had come at Leiden University, and it caused an uproar among those who considered it a challenge to the whole system of education and thought that had been in existence throughout Europe for centuries. Wullens had stood with those who opposed the new philosophy. Descartes never forgot an enemy.

But there was another reason for the anger. In a peculiar way, much of Descartes' career had been a kind of chess match with death, and for a long time he had actually convinced himself that he had the upper hand. He had been a sickly child, with a pale complexion and a dry cough that he had inherited from his mother, who died when he was a year old. His father--a jurist and a man of power and ambition--seems to have despised the child's weakness and favored his older brother. The family doctors didn't bother to hide from the boy their conviction that he would die young.

When he was ten, however, Descartes was sent off to the Jesuit college of La Fleche in Anjou, one of the finest educational establishments in Europe. There, to his surprise, he flourished. He became strong, healthy, vigorous, aware of the wider world, and hungry for knowledge. But the early experience remained lodged inside him. When he settled into his mature work, medicine became its central focus. He developed his revolutionary philosophy, with its grounding not in the Bible or ancient writers but in human reason, and became famous and infamous for it. But the heart of it, the deep reason for it, was his desire to solve the puzzle of the body, to cure disease, and to lengthen human life--including his own. At the end of the Discourse on the Method, his epoch-changing work of philosophy, he vowed to the reader not that in the future he would craft a revised metaphysics or a new approach to mathematics but that he would "devote what time I may still have to live to no other occupation than that of endeavoring to acquire some knowledge of Nature, which shall be of such a kind as to enable us therefrom to deduce rules in medicine of greater certainty than those in present use." Five years before he lay dying in Sweden he wrote to an English earl, "The preservation of health has always been the principal end of my studies."

The same goal was in the minds of many of his contemporaries. When we think of science and the spark of modernity, we tend to think of astronomy: Galileo crafting his telescopes and peering into the skies above central Italy; locating sunspots, moons around Jupiter, craters on the earth's moon, and other irregularities in a universe that the church had taught was perfect; amassing data that corroborated the theory that the earth revolves around the sun; encountering the systematic wrath of the Inquisition. In our perennial effort to understand who we are and what it means that we are "modern," we choose astronomy as a starting point in part because it provides a sturdy metaphorical peg for thinking of the massive change that humanity underwent in the seventeenth century, when we--seemingly--left our mythic, biblical selves behind and reoriented ourselves in the cosmos. In 1957--the year of Sputnik and the dawning of the space age, a time when people had a simpler, clearer sense of "modern" than they do today and felt ready to embrace what they thought the word meant--a best-selling book expressed this idea in its title: the change was "From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe."

But one could just as easily see modernity springing from the intense interest in the human body that arose in Europe at the same time. If our place in the universe is an elemental marker of who we think we are, our physical being is something more. The magnitude of human suffering down the centuries is somewhat quantifiable. The life expectancy of a child born in Descartes' France was twenty-eight; in England between 1540 and 1800 it was an estimated thirty-seven. Similar rates--in the twenties and thirties--held for high-born citizens of ancient Rome, forager societies in Africa and South America, and people in rural India and China into the early twentieth century. More than half of all children born in London around the time of the American Revolution could be expected to die by age fifteen. And most deaths in early modern Europe were caused not by war or marauding brigands but by disease. Century upon century, hour after desperate hour, parents watched helplessly as their children succumbed to maladies whose very names--ague, apoplexy, flux, dropsy, commotion, consumption--spoke of the misty ignorance that was a definitive sentence.

The mists have lifted somewhat in three and a half centuries--we live longer and healthier lives--and still the body remains a touchstone of modernity. Zoloft, Lipitor, Viagra, Botox, ibuprofen, angioplasty, insulin, birth control pills, hormone replacement therapy, anabolic steroids--we don't merely allow science and technology into our physical beings but insist that they continually do more to better manipulate and aid the brute facts of our flesh and blood and bone selves. Embedded in this outlook is an idea of the body as a machine, so that illness is seen as a breakdown of the machine, healing involves repairing the broken parts, and a doctor is a kind of mechanic with medications as his or her tools. This simplistic view has been changing in the last twenty or thirty years. We have a hankering now to see mind and body as deeply connected, to appreciate the way thoughts and the environment influence our physical being. Yet the mechanical model has been very successful, and our medicine is still largely constructed around it. And it was this model that came into being in Descartes' generation.

This new way of viewing the human body was bewildering when it was first aired. Many people, in fact, equated it with atheism. It was frankly at odds with the overall approach to knowledge in the period against which modernity arose. Aristotelianism, or Scholasticism, was a blend of Christian theology and thinking derived from Aristotle and other ancient Greeks. These streams of thought had stewed together f...

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 038551753X
• ISBN 13: 9780385517539
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320